"3. Apple didn't open source the core of OSX. It already was open-sourced. OSX uses the BSD core. Apple had to release its fork. This is the license NeXT agreed to when they based their OS on BSD."
I think you might need to go read the BSD license sometime, Apple most certainly could have taken BSD and closed it's source - as can anyone. Instead, Apple released the source to their OS core under a license similar to Mozilla's.
Microsoft on the other hand have taken many BSD userspace tools, closed their source, and removed attribution - yet no one seems to claim that NT is BSD or criticizes the decision to close the source of those tools. Perhaps Apple should have taken that route.
It's also a bit of a stretch to suggest that Apple just took BSD and stuck it under a different license. Last time I looked BSD wasn't a microkernel OS, and didn't use the same subsystems for drivers and inter process communications. If Darwin is just a ripoff of BSD, then Linux is just a ripoff of HURD.
"How well can your PC record HDMI signals with HDCP? In fact, which affordable capture cards can capture anything above composite video or S-video?"
My machine captures HD signals through a digital tuner so I have no idea what an HDMI capture card costs, but it only takes one person with such a setup to make the recording available on Pirate Bay - hence the reason I was speculating that increased restrictions on recording are more likely to send people clamoring for bittorrent for their fix of pre-recorded HD content than paying indefinitely for a box that you can never own, never transfer recordings from, and that will sometimes fail to record when you want it most.
"I think this will happen: For one thing, this will only work with expensive set-top DVR boxes provided by the cable company - they will be the only things able to decode the DRM. This means that aftermarket DVRs will be second-class citizens, consolidating the control of the cable companies."
I don't see that happening, my aftermarket DVR is a PC. It may be a second-class citizen when it comes to pay TV, but I don't see the pay TV companies offering a box with Bittorrent and DivX capability. The reality is that as they amp up restrictions on purpose built DVRs more people are going to abandon broadcast signals and go to the internet to get an unrestricted version of what they want to record.
I can't say I prefer having one button on the trackpad on my PowerBook, but there's another method to right click than the one you mention. You can just tap instead of scrolling with two fingers for a click, no need to touch the mouse button.
Being able to "tap" a right button with two fingers would be a valuable feature on PC laptops (I virtually never touch the trackpad button), but a right mouse button on the MacBook (Pro) would be of more value IMHO since they are hardware compatible with Windows and "right dragging" is a useful gesture in Windows that I find uncomfortable to do with the 2 fingers + button method.
Firstly, I feel you demonstrate overt bias and a lack of good judgment by refusing to acknowledge that some people are able to use drugs and function at a high level. I don't refuse to accept that there are negative consequences to drug use, merely that there is no convincing evidence of mental illness or permanent brain damage which could be the cause of mental illness in long term marijuana use, the millions of functioning marijuana users around the world are testament to the fact that marijuana use is a low-risk activity with no conclusive evidence of long term damage, and plenty of evidence of short term benefits, including mitigating the side effects of many prescription drugs and health conditions.
By no means am I attempting to charaterize drug use as beneficial or even harmless, I'm just trying to point out that hysteria about drugs benefits nobody, and harms many by turning them into criminals or social pariahs for indulging in something that has never been proven to be as harmful as society's most abused substance: alcohol, nor as it's second most abused - physiologically addictive prescription opiate analgesics.
Truth be known, I suspect, as you do, that drugs were not beneficial to their careers in any way - but it cannot be ruled out that drugs contribute to success in some people any more than it can be ruled out that it causes mental illness. By pointing out the idea of drugs contributing to success to be preposterous you invalidate the argument in favour of mental illnesses caused by marijuana, that was my point not "glorifying my successful friends". Your failure to consider that point is indicative of your mindset.
"It is completely valid to correlate the success of an individual with drug use. You will find that many studies have been done (you do the research, I already got my masters), which correlate prevelance of drugs in an environment with economic outcomes of those in that environment."
Unfortunately, having a masters degree doesn't imply anything except that you're capable of functioning in an academic environment, plenty of flawed ideas are held by people with stellar qualifications. Remember that the most educated people in the world at one time subscribed to phlogiston and flat-earth theories, even today plenty of people with degrees behind them subscribe to nonsense like intelligent design. At any rate I'm not about to get into a dick-length argument about who has the longer suffix after their name, it's got nothing to do with what I'm discussing.
As for these studies you mention, I believe they probably strengthen my argument that you cannot conclusively prove whether drug use leads to a certain condition or that a certain condition leads to drug use - your inability to cite any sources makes it difficult to refute your claims.
Substitute mental illness or occupational success for poverty and you should be able to see my point (or at least a reasonable person would concede that I have one). It's a chicken-and-egg problem that no amount of self-selecting studies can solve, only by proving a mechanism by which marijuana can cause and later aggravate a dormant mental illness can the argument be settled. That hasn't happened yet as far as I'm aware. If you have evidence to the contrary, cite away.
"There are several which study mental performance before, after, and during drug use - The egg frying commercial was pretty accurate, by ALL measures. Do the research, and instead of glorifying your successful friends, pity them for what more they could be doing."
Sorry, but I've read extensively and haven't found studies that substantiate claims of permanent brain damage resulting from marijuana use, the same can't be said of alcohol consumption and other forms of solvent abuse like glue-sniffing and butane-huffing which are commonplace, legal and haven't been the subject of the same level of scrutiny as marijuana.
If I'm going to pity anyone, it's you for subscribing to the notion that "drugs are bad, mmkay" without good r
Way to totally miss the point of what I was saying, the metric I was using to measure their success is that they are either on the executive teams of well-known companies, or have over a million dollars in the bank. I'm not about to start naming names for obvious reasons.
I wasn't trying to "push pills" but to point out that it's completely invalid to correlate their success or lack of mental illness to their drug use. Equally as invalid as trying to correlate schizophrenia and marijuana.
If marijuana were going to induce schizophrenia, explain the mechanism by which it doesn't induce schizophrenia until the person has abused it for many years and why episodes of schizophrenia don't correspond to periods of increased marijuana use. While you're at it you might also want to explain how it does all of this without evidence of brain damage even in lifetime users.
"Rock music in the fifies, rap music today, it makes really no difference."...Elvis didn't do a drive by on the Beatles when they became more popular than he....and which rapper did what you're suggesting?
"And I know an otherwise wonderful woman who now suffers from schizophrenia after smoking marijuana for most of her life. Just because [i]you[/i] haven't come into contact with the negative effects of marijuana doesn't mean they don't exist."
Most of the very successful people I know use drugs, among them marijuana. Such people are usually operating at a very high level where they are expected to take risks, and sometimes even fail. I can speculate that these people are prone to use drugs (including party-pills, cigarettes, coffee and alcohol as well as illicit substances) to stay awake, enhance their confidence, and de-stress after a hard day, and of course because they have the disposable income to afford them - but it could be that their drug use or the corresponding cost of it is what caused them to be so successful. I can't say for sure what part drugs played in their success...
In the same way, you can't possibly know whether your friend was drawn to drugs as a way to self-medicate and mitigate the symptoms of her condition. Your friend may have been borderline schizophrenic before she started smoking pot, and delayed the inevitable by smoking constantly, or her marijuana use may simply be absolutely unrelated.
I know many people who smoke pot (whereas you profess to only know one), and not a single person I know of has behaved in a way that would suggest, or been diagnosed with a mental illness - therefore I deduce that pot-smoking can protect you from mental illness using a far more convincing sample size than yours - it doesn't mean my conclusion is any less baseless than yours.
And it's not just Windows either.... When I bought my first Mac back in 2001-2002ish (a hideously expensive TiBook) I was already planning to nuke OS9 and go OSX only due to my being a NeXT refugee, I was stunned that the first thing OS9 did after telling me how "Welcome" I was to use the $10,000NZD computer I'd just paid for, was to ask me to fork over some more cash for Quicktime Pro.
At that point I powered down the machine and blew away all traces of OS 9. Quicktime in OS X is definitely more tolerable (and unfortunately, neccesary) than Windows, but even paying a fortune to Apple for a "pro" computer doesn't get you a free version of Quicktime Pro.
Personally, I use and distribute pirate keys for Quicktime Pro for Mac, since you have no choice but to use Quicktime if you want access to codecs. It's reprehensible to cripple such a key library, and a piece of bad behaviour that not even Microsoft has an answer to.
"Menus are not really that great. Ribbons are more like context sensitive toolbars on steroids. Menus are bad as they hide all the functionality. Better than using the keyboard though. Too many small buttons on a tool bar and it just looks cluttered. People have the screen real estate the days so you can afford to have hierarchical toolbars now. Best of both worlds."
Which of course goes back to the original topic of someone deciding that a perfectly good set of user interface, examples of which are rife throughout all GUIs is somehow "bad". Combining a whole lot of things together just because you can isn't necessarily better. A swiss army knife is nice, but it's no match for all the individual tools by themselves, even though it's more compact, and every tool more immediately accessible.
The point I was leaning toward in my original post is that in my experience of rolling out Office 12 to about 300 or so users across some 20-odd sites, most people are completely thrown off by the new interface and come to hate it after using it for a short time. I was using that as an example of how crappy interface decisions aren't the sole domain of open source software, I'm surprised to hear that other people haven't had similar experiences with Office 12 given that the disdain for it seems to be universal. That's hardly the only example, even looking at Microsoft. Microsoft Bob anyone? Clippy perhaps? The XP search puppy?
I was trying to say that the score seems to be nil all in the interface game and using the most prominent example of a terrible interface I could imagine and I cruelly scapegoated the ribbon, when in fact it's the terrible decisions taken to make way for it that I object to. There is no need to remove the menu bar, other than that someone at Microsoft decided to play god and take it away because "users should use our new shiny instead, look how shiny it is", which is essentially what happened with Pidgin's message box.
Having clearly established that commercial vendors are just as insensitive to the wants of their users as open source authors, I wanted to highlight that you're not "screwed" as with a commercial vendor, because it only requires one developer to start a fork of an open project whereas nobody can do the same with a closed source product. Please, if you have a comment that relates to that without going off on a tangent about how fantastic the ribbon is (for you), then go ahead...
"What part of making all the commonly used features much more accessible is NOT a benefit. If you are one of those peole who spends most of their time in word using a mouse then its a great benefit."
I should have been more clear, the ribbon itself is not the problem, the fact that someone felt it was a replacement for standard menu bars is a travesty. I'm sure that the "intelligent" aspects of the interface will fit average users as well as those pesky arrows that always seem to hide the menu options you want in previous versions of Office. That sounds like a great idea on the face of things too.
Anyway, menu-bars, be they at the top or bottom of the screen or attached to application windows, are a great invention, so great that every GUI since the Xerox Star has featured them. Why, with the introduction of Vista, have menu bars suddenly become an object of shame that deserves to disappear into the ether whenever possible?
What does this have to do with the ribbon? fuck-all really. Like I said I should have been more clear... It's late... I'm rambling... Zzz
"But what I do know is that if a version shipped with features nobody wanted, people would stop buying it. Instant negative feedback, especially the prospect of programmers losing their jobs."
What a load of bollocks, you need look no further than Office 12 for an example of a commercial developer losing their way and creating a UI feature that most users are not going to feel is a benefit (the ribbon). Arguably, Vista is the same. It's unlikely that Vista is going to fail as a commercial product, and even less likely that Office will.
"The problem with FOSS is... these guys don't get paid. If you don't like it, that's too bad you ungrateful bastard"
No, that's the problem with commercial proprietary software. It only takes one developer to change the course of an open source product, it may take many thousands of users voting with their wallets before a commercial vendor takes any notice at all, and even then they may decide that their new feature is so great they should proceed regardless. Which is pretty much where Pidgin is at the moment.
I guess what they really meant was that Firefox on the Mac is a piece of shit (Firefox 3 is much much better admittedly), it takes an age to load, looks butt-ugly compared to the rest of OS X and gets the non-windows penalty of form widgets that look like rejects from the motif tryouts.
Without significant tweaks (optimized builds, themes, widget hacks), it doesn't even look like a native application on the Mac, let alone behave like one. A large part of what Mac users feel when they use Firefox is probably the same feeling Windows folk get when they look at Safari in Windows, doesn't seem much better than the one that came with the OS and feels and looks foreign. Add to that the slowness factor, and it becomes pretty unpalatable.
Having said all that, I'm a long time Firefox user on the Mac, I have a lot of experience with Firefox and I use different platforms and like to be able to take my bookmark-sync with me between my desktop and laptop so I put up with it's foibles, but I totally see the other side of the argument.
Education is your friend, not spreading falsehoods. Which is not to say everything in your post is untrue: just parts of it.
I feel so reassured after having read that perfectly independant document that was full of information about exactly what they do with "spent" fuel rods, which most certainly are still strong gamma emitters. With "education" like that it's no wonder most Americans are behind the push to dot the planet with permanently contaminated sites that will still be dangerous to the archaeologists digging up the remains of "western civilisation" in 1000 years from now.
Nuclear power plants, OTOH, there's a technology which could help."
Yes, that's the mentally balanced answer!
After all there's nothing more benign a powerplant that outputs high-level "spent" nuclear waste that we have nowhere in the world to store, and is going to remain "hot" for at least another hundred thousand years, not to mention the radioactive contamination left behind when they finally close down, that sees their former site uninhabitable for about the same time as the aforementioned waste.
As for those trifling concerns about how such reactors safely contain and process the constant stream of radioactive steam and water created during their operation, all the aforementioned concerns rightly pale by comparison to the proven unquestionably armageddon-like catastrophic effects of carbon dioxide and smoke particles escaping into the environment.
And if there's one thing we can be unquestionably certain of, it's that absolutely no carbon whatsoever is released into the environment during the extracting, (re)processing, transporting and safe-storage of all that radioactive material. I mean, imagine the dirty bomb they could create if Al Qaeda got their hands on some coal or oil.
Oh please! Won't somebody think of the environment!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I must perform seppuku for this shameful display of my ignorance.:)
Oooh ooh! it would be an honour if I could chop your head off once you have disemboweled yourself to prevent you from screaming out and thus shaming yourself and your family further.
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"3. Apple didn't open source the core of OSX. It already was open-sourced. OSX uses the BSD core. Apple had to release its fork. This is the license NeXT agreed to when they based their OS on BSD."
I think you might need to go read the BSD license sometime, Apple most certainly could have taken BSD and closed it's source - as can anyone. Instead, Apple released the source to their OS core under a license similar to Mozilla's.
Microsoft on the other hand have taken many BSD userspace tools, closed their source, and removed attribution - yet no one seems to claim that NT is BSD or criticizes the decision to close the source of those tools. Perhaps Apple should have taken that route.
It's also a bit of a stretch to suggest that Apple just took BSD and stuck it under a different license. Last time I looked BSD wasn't a microkernel OS, and didn't use the same subsystems for drivers and inter process communications. If Darwin is just a ripoff of BSD, then Linux is just a ripoff of HURD.
Just type
apt-get remove libflashsupport; echo "I'm a `uname` noob"
"How well can your PC record HDMI signals with HDCP? In fact, which affordable capture cards can capture anything above composite video or S-video?"
My machine captures HD signals through a digital tuner so I have no idea what an HDMI capture card costs, but it only takes one person with such a setup to make the recording available on Pirate Bay - hence the reason I was speculating that increased restrictions on recording are more likely to send people clamoring for bittorrent for their fix of pre-recorded HD content than paying indefinitely for a box that you can never own, never transfer recordings from, and that will sometimes fail to record when you want it most.
"I think this will happen: For one thing, this will only work with expensive set-top DVR boxes provided by the cable company - they will be the only things able to decode the DRM. This means that aftermarket DVRs will be second-class citizens, consolidating the control of the cable companies."
I don't see that happening, my aftermarket DVR is a PC. It may be a second-class citizen when it comes to pay TV, but I don't see the pay TV companies offering a box with Bittorrent and DivX capability. The reality is that as they amp up restrictions on purpose built DVRs more people are going to abandon broadcast signals and go to the internet to get an unrestricted version of what they want to record.
I can't say I prefer having one button on the trackpad on my PowerBook, but there's another method to right click than the one you mention. You can just tap instead of scrolling with two fingers for a click, no need to touch the mouse button.
Being able to "tap" a right button with two fingers would be a valuable feature on PC laptops (I virtually never touch the trackpad button), but a right mouse button on the MacBook (Pro) would be of more value IMHO since they are hardware compatible with Windows and "right dragging" is a useful gesture in Windows that I find uncomfortable to do with the 2 fingers + button method.
"Never argue with an idiot. They bring you down to their level and beat you with experience."
butbut... but... he has a master's degree in something, he can't possibly be an idiot...
Firstly, I feel you demonstrate overt bias and a lack of good judgment by refusing to acknowledge that some people are able to use drugs and function at a high level. I don't refuse to accept that there are negative consequences to drug use, merely that there is no convincing evidence of mental illness or permanent brain damage which could be the cause of mental illness in long term marijuana use, the millions of functioning marijuana users around the world are testament to the fact that marijuana use is a low-risk activity with no conclusive evidence of long term damage, and plenty of evidence of short term benefits, including mitigating the side effects of many prescription drugs and health conditions.
By no means am I attempting to charaterize drug use as beneficial or even harmless, I'm just trying to point out that hysteria about drugs benefits nobody, and harms many by turning them into criminals or social pariahs for indulging in something that has never been proven to be as harmful as society's most abused substance: alcohol, nor as it's second most abused - physiologically addictive prescription opiate analgesics.
Truth be known, I suspect, as you do, that drugs were not beneficial to their careers in any way - but it cannot be ruled out that drugs contribute to success in some people any more than it can be ruled out that it causes mental illness. By pointing out the idea of drugs contributing to success to be preposterous you invalidate the argument in favour of mental illnesses caused by marijuana, that was my point not "glorifying my successful friends". Your failure to consider that point is indicative of your mindset.
"It is completely valid to correlate the success of an individual with drug use. You will find that many studies have been done (you do the research, I already got my masters), which correlate prevelance of drugs in an environment with economic outcomes of those in that environment."
Unfortunately, having a masters degree doesn't imply anything except that you're capable of functioning in an academic environment, plenty of flawed ideas are held by people with stellar qualifications. Remember that the most educated people in the world at one time subscribed to phlogiston and flat-earth theories, even today plenty of people with degrees behind them subscribe to nonsense like intelligent design. At any rate I'm not about to get into a dick-length argument about who has the longer suffix after their name, it's got nothing to do with what I'm discussing.
As for these studies you mention, I believe they probably strengthen my argument that you cannot conclusively prove whether drug use leads to a certain condition or that a certain condition leads to drug use - your inability to cite any sources makes it difficult to refute your claims.
Substitute mental illness or occupational success for poverty and you should be able to see my point (or at least a reasonable person would concede that I have one). It's a chicken-and-egg problem that no amount of self-selecting studies can solve, only by proving a mechanism by which marijuana can cause and later aggravate a dormant mental illness can the argument be settled. That hasn't happened yet as far as I'm aware. If you have evidence to the contrary, cite away.
"There are several which study mental performance before, after, and during drug use - The egg frying commercial was pretty accurate, by ALL measures. Do the research, and instead of glorifying your successful friends, pity them for what more they could be doing."
Sorry, but I've read extensively and haven't found studies that substantiate claims of permanent brain damage resulting from marijuana use, the same can't be said of alcohol consumption and other forms of solvent abuse like glue-sniffing and butane-huffing which are commonplace, legal and haven't been the subject of the same level of scrutiny as marijuana.
If I'm going to pity anyone, it's you for subscribing to the notion that "drugs are bad, mmkay" without good r
Way to totally miss the point of what I was saying, the metric I was using to measure their success is that they are either on the executive teams of well-known companies, or have over a million dollars in the bank. I'm not about to start naming names for obvious reasons.
I wasn't trying to "push pills" but to point out that it's completely invalid to correlate their success or lack of mental illness to their drug use. Equally as invalid as trying to correlate schizophrenia and marijuana.
If marijuana were going to induce schizophrenia, explain the mechanism by which it doesn't induce schizophrenia until the person has abused it for many years and why episodes of schizophrenia don't correspond to periods of increased marijuana use. While you're at it you might also want to explain how it does all of this without evidence of brain damage even in lifetime users.
"Rock music in the fifies, rap music today, it makes really no difference." ...Elvis didn't do a drive by on the Beatles when they became more popular than he. ...and which rapper did what you're suggesting?
"And I know an otherwise wonderful woman who now suffers from schizophrenia after smoking marijuana for most of her life. Just because [i]you[/i] haven't come into contact with the negative effects of marijuana doesn't mean they don't exist."
Most of the very successful people I know use drugs, among them marijuana. Such people are usually operating at a very high level where they are expected to take risks, and sometimes even fail. I can speculate that these people are prone to use drugs (including party-pills, cigarettes, coffee and alcohol as well as illicit substances) to stay awake, enhance their confidence, and de-stress after a hard day, and of course because they have the disposable income to afford them - but it could be that their drug use or the corresponding cost of it is what caused them to be so successful. I can't say for sure what part drugs played in their success...
In the same way, you can't possibly know whether your friend was drawn to drugs as a way to self-medicate and mitigate the symptoms of her condition. Your friend may have been borderline schizophrenic before she started smoking pot, and delayed the inevitable by smoking constantly, or her marijuana use may simply be absolutely unrelated.
I know many people who smoke pot (whereas you profess to only know one), and not a single person I know of has behaved in a way that would suggest, or been diagnosed with a mental illness - therefore I deduce that pot-smoking can protect you from mental illness using a far more convincing sample size than yours - it doesn't mean my conclusion is any less baseless than yours.
Don't worry, the deutherium evens things out.
And it's not just Windows either.... When I bought my first Mac back in 2001-2002ish (a hideously expensive TiBook) I was already planning to nuke OS9 and go OSX only due to my being a NeXT refugee, I was stunned that the first thing OS9 did after telling me how "Welcome" I was to use the $10,000NZD computer I'd just paid for, was to ask me to fork over some more cash for Quicktime Pro.
At that point I powered down the machine and blew away all traces of OS 9. Quicktime in OS X is definitely more tolerable (and unfortunately, neccesary) than Windows, but even paying a fortune to Apple for a "pro" computer doesn't get you a free version of Quicktime Pro.
Personally, I use and distribute pirate keys for Quicktime Pro for Mac, since you have no choice but to use Quicktime if you want access to codecs. It's reprehensible to cripple such a key library, and a piece of bad behaviour that not even Microsoft has an answer to.
"Menus are not really that great. Ribbons are more like context sensitive toolbars on steroids. Menus are bad as they hide all the functionality. Better than using the keyboard though. Too many small buttons on a tool bar and it just looks cluttered. People have the screen real estate the days so you can afford to have hierarchical toolbars now. Best of both worlds."
Which of course goes back to the original topic of someone deciding that a perfectly good set of user interface, examples of which are rife throughout all GUIs is somehow "bad". Combining a whole lot of things together just because you can isn't necessarily better. A swiss army knife is nice, but it's no match for all the individual tools by themselves, even though it's more compact, and every tool more immediately accessible.
The point I was leaning toward in my original post is that in my experience of rolling out Office 12 to about 300 or so users across some 20-odd sites, most people are completely thrown off by the new interface and come to hate it after using it for a short time. I was using that as an example of how crappy interface decisions aren't the sole domain of open source software, I'm surprised to hear that other people haven't had similar experiences with Office 12 given that the disdain for it seems to be universal. That's hardly the only example, even looking at Microsoft. Microsoft Bob anyone? Clippy perhaps? The XP search puppy?
I was trying to say that the score seems to be nil all in the interface game and using the most prominent example of a terrible interface I could imagine and I cruelly scapegoated the ribbon, when in fact it's the terrible decisions taken to make way for it that I object to. There is no need to remove the menu bar, other than that someone at Microsoft decided to play god and take it away because "users should use our new shiny instead, look how shiny it is", which is essentially what happened with Pidgin's message box.
Having clearly established that commercial vendors are just as insensitive to the wants of their users as open source authors, I wanted to highlight that you're not "screwed" as with a commercial vendor, because it only requires one developer to start a fork of an open project whereas nobody can do the same with a closed source product. Please, if you have a comment that relates to that without going off on a tangent about how fantastic the ribbon is (for you), then go ahead...
"What part of making all the commonly used features much more accessible is NOT a benefit. If you are one of those peole who spends most of their time in word using a mouse then its a great benefit."
I should have been more clear, the ribbon itself is not the problem, the fact that someone felt it was a replacement for standard menu bars is a travesty. I'm sure that the "intelligent" aspects of the interface will fit average users as well as those pesky arrows that always seem to hide the menu options you want in previous versions of Office. That sounds like a great idea on the face of things too.
Anyway, menu-bars, be they at the top or bottom of the screen or attached to application windows, are a great invention, so great that every GUI since the Xerox Star has featured them. Why, with the introduction of Vista, have menu bars suddenly become an object of shame that deserves to disappear into the ether whenever possible?
What does this have to do with the ribbon? fuck-all really. Like I said I should have been more clear... It's late... I'm rambling... Zzz
"But what I do know is that if a version shipped with features nobody wanted, people would stop buying it. Instant negative feedback, especially the prospect of programmers losing their jobs."
What a load of bollocks, you need look no further than Office 12 for an example of a commercial developer losing their way and creating a UI feature that most users are not going to feel is a benefit (the ribbon). Arguably, Vista is the same. It's unlikely that Vista is going to fail as a commercial product, and even less likely that Office will.
"The problem with FOSS is... these guys don't get paid. If you don't like it, that's too bad you ungrateful bastard"
No, that's the problem with commercial proprietary software. It only takes one developer to change the course of an open source product, it may take many thousands of users voting with their wallets before a commercial vendor takes any notice at all, and even then they may decide that their new feature is so great they should proceed regardless. Which is pretty much where Pidgin is at the moment.
From where I sit the score is nil all.
I guess what they really meant was that Firefox on the Mac is a piece of shit (Firefox 3 is much much better admittedly), it takes an age to load, looks butt-ugly compared to the rest of OS X and gets the non-windows penalty of form widgets that look like rejects from the motif tryouts.
Without significant tweaks (optimized builds, themes, widget hacks), it doesn't even look like a native application on the Mac, let alone behave like one. A large part of what Mac users feel when they use Firefox is probably the same feeling Windows folk get when they look at Safari in Windows, doesn't seem much better than the one that came with the OS and feels and looks foreign. Add to that the slowness factor, and it becomes pretty unpalatable.
Having said all that, I'm a long time Firefox user on the Mac, I have a lot of experience with Firefox and I use different platforms and like to be able to take my bookmark-sync with me between my desktop and laptop so I put up with it's foibles, but I totally see the other side of the argument.
Amen to that Brother!
Education is your friend, not spreading falsehoods. Which is not to say everything in your post is untrue: just parts of it.
I feel so reassured after having read that perfectly independant document that was full of information about exactly what they do with "spent" fuel rods, which most certainly are still strong gamma emitters. With "education" like that it's no wonder most Americans are behind the push to dot the planet with permanently contaminated sites that will still be dangerous to the archaeologists digging up the remains of "western civilisation" in 1000 years from now.
You're right, I feel like such an idioticite. :(
"I've planted tens of thousands of trees in my life. Where do I go to get my carbon credit? :)"
Dope plants don't count.
Nuclear power plants, OTOH, there's a technology which could help."
Yes, that's the mentally balanced answer!
After all there's nothing more benign a powerplant that outputs high-level "spent" nuclear waste that we have nowhere in the world to store, and is going to remain "hot" for at least another hundred thousand years, not to mention the radioactive contamination left behind when they finally close down, that sees their former site uninhabitable for about the same time as the aforementioned waste.
As for those trifling concerns about how such reactors safely contain and process the constant stream of radioactive steam and water created during their operation, all the aforementioned concerns rightly pale by comparison to the proven unquestionably armageddon-like catastrophic effects of carbon dioxide and smoke particles escaping into the environment.
And if there's one thing we can be unquestionably certain of, it's that absolutely no carbon whatsoever is released into the environment during the extracting, (re)processing, transporting and safe-storage of all that radioactive material. I mean, imagine the dirty bomb they could create if Al Qaeda got their hands on some coal or oil.
Oh please! Won't somebody think of the environment!
"I voted for labour so that we wouldn't have this sort of idioticity, and looks like I came out the idiot as we now have even more of it!"
No, you came out looking like an idiot because you think idiocity is a word.
Uh... Open VMS is not a variant of Unix.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I must perform seppuku for this shameful display of my ignorance. :)
Oooh ooh! it would be an honour if I could chop your head off once you have disemboweled yourself to prevent you from screaming out and thus shaming yourself and your family further.
Amen to that!
I found IE4's integration just a bit too buggy and creepy and haven't used a Windows desktop since.